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Pride has divorced blackness from queerness: Cole

The intersection of race and queerness remains a particularly stubborn set of oppressions to overcome.

Marchers with Black Lives Matter Toronto sit down to halt the annual Pride Parade on Sunday. "Toronto scorns blacks for raining on the parade, when in reality black people are claiming a piece of Pride they have historically been denied," writes Desmond Cole. (Mark Blinch / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

By Desmond Cole

Thu., July 7, 2016

Pride is a celebration of inclusion, you say? Well, Toronto’s black Pride community says Pride is not an inclusive space for trans people, bisexuals, queers, lesbians, gays, two-spirited people, and intersex people who also happen to be black — that it has never been inclusive enough of such individuals.

The public would rather not hear this. On Sunday, Black Lives Matter Toronto halted the annual Pride parade to remind us that black people also identify as LGBTQ2SI, and that their exclusion from the family must end. They were booed, harassed, and taunted by many of the Pride revellers, by folks who claimed they had gathered to celebrate inclusion.

The idea that BLMTO “hijacked” the parade to advance its own agenda assumes that the black struggle is somehow separate from that of Pride. This assumption — that blackness is somehow divorced from queerness and queer politics — explains why blacks have been so unwelcome within one of the largest queer celebrations in the world from the beginning.

Pride originated in Toronto after police raids of local bathhouses, resulting in hundreds of gay men being beaten, arrested, and humiliated. The community responded in part by forming the Citizens’ Independent Review of Police Actions (CIRPA), a coalition of white, black, and south Asians who had experienced police brutality because of their various racial, sexual and gender identities and expressions.

Longtime gay activist Tim McCaskell told me in a phone interview that well-known local black activists Dudley Laws and Charles Roach were among those providing support to CIRPA. Months after the raids, during a large rally at city hall against police brutality, Rev. Brent Hawkes, the beloved openly gay, white clergyman, approached the microphone to speak. “Some people in the gathering began shouting that they didn’t want to hear from a gay man,” said McCaskell, “but it was members of the black community who insisted Hawkes had the right to speak.”

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Despite this history, blacks and south Asians had difficulty integrating into the gay scene. “They would be targeted by security at clubs,” McCaskell said. “Security would say, ‘This is a gay club — do you really want to be here?” As Pride and the gay village expanded, people of colour were left behind.

Just as people of colour have had to fight to be recognized in queer spaces, so have lesbians, intersex people, trans people, and genderqueer people. Those who take for granted that Pride includes separate marches for dykes and trans people may not know how hard these communities had to fight (and continue to fight) to be included. But the intersection of race and queerness remains a particularly stubborn set of oppressions to overcome.

For almost 15 years, Syrus Marcus Ware, a black trans man, has worked to sustain Blackness Yes!, a community-based committee that celebrates black queer and trans history, creativity and activism. In turn, Blackness Yes! has supported Blockorama, a party space within Pride festivities set aside specifically for black queer, trans, and intersex people.

“Part of why Blackness Yes! started is because it was such a white festival, one that was actively unwelcoming to black and trans people of colour,” said Ware during a phone chat. In its 18-year history, Pride has repeatedly underfunded Blockorama, moved its venue, and situated it far away from the main Pride festivities. “The idea that we could be black and queer, black and trans, is unfathomable to too many people in our community,” Ware said. “We don’t belong because they’ve never expected us there.”

When BLMTO halted the parade on Sunday, Ware took the microphone to explain this mostly unknown struggle to Toronto’s Pride family, and to echo BLMTO’s call for more funding, for better inclusion of people of colour. As the crowd booed him and told him to move along, Ware said, “I am so saddened to see that after 18 years, nothing has changed.”

As Ware and others fight tirelessly for visibility and acceptance within Pride, media and politicians fret about whether or not the cops, whose brutality birthed Pride, will now feel welcome (BLMTO has demanded to end police floats in the parade). Rinaldo Walcott, a black queer academic in Toronto, pointed out in a phone interview that “white queers have long argued that the militarization of Pride — floats for the army, the military, the navy — is inappropriate.”

But our city still feels particularly threatened to hear the same demands from black people, and questions their right to speak at Pride. Says Walcott, “That tells us how deep the problem of anti-black racism is, in queer communities and beyond.” Toronto scorns blacks for raining on the parade, when in reality black people are claiming a piece of Pride they have historically been denied.

Desmond Cole is a Toronto-based journalist. His column appears every second Thursday.

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